With the rapid development and popularization of network and communication technologies, the way of communications realized through networks become more frequent and important in people's daily life. Recently, in addition to traditional literal expressions, emoticons such as emoji have been used as another “language” for communication and become more and more popular. Emoticons are particularly preferred by young network users for expression of their opinions, emotions, attitude and so on. In order to fulfill users' expression needs, existing input method products are provided with entries to emoticons for the users to select desired emoticons. In order to further improve user experience, existing input method products can record emoticons which are frequently used by the users to establish a list of frequently-used emoticons, and display the frequently used emoticons through display devices of mobile terminals. Thus, the users can conveniently find emoticons which they want from the frequently-used emoticons.
However, when a user expresses himself or herself using emoticons, he or she tends to input a sequence or combination of emoticons to strength tones or emotions, etc. For example, when a user wants to indicate the cooperation is pleasant, he or she may continuously input emoticons such as “handshake” plus “thumb-up” plus “tea” to show thankfulness or appreciation to his or her partner. For the input of such type of emoticon combination or sequence, the user needs to continuously input a plurality of emoticons, and spends a lot of time on input of each emoticon. This obviously results in reduced input efficiency and lowered user experience.